Gayl Jones, Imani Perry and Sharon Olds are among the finalists for the 2022 National Book Awards, to be held in November in New York.
The finalists, announced by the New York Times on Tuesday morning, include 25 writers across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature.
Among the fiction nominees are Jones, a 1998 National Book Awards fiction finalist and 2022 Pulitzer Prize nominee for her 2021 novel, Palmares, her first in 22 years. Her most recent novel, The Birdcatcher, follows a group of Black American artists in Ibiza. There are three debut novels on the list – Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch, set in a low-income housing complex in Indiana; Sarah Thankam Mathews’s All This Could Be Different, a story of young adulthood about a young, queer Indian immigrant in the midwest; and Alejandro Varela’s The Town of Babylon, about a queer Latinx professor who returns to care for his ageing parents on Long Island. Jamil Jan Kochai’s story collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories reckons with the displacement of the Afghan diaspora in the United States and modern Afghanistan.
Finalists for nonfiction include Megan O’Rourke for The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness; Imani Perry for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation; and Ingrid Rojas Contreras for The Man Who Could Move Clouds. Science and nature writer David Quammen’s Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus examines the lead-up to the Covid-19 pandemic, while His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, by Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, offers a biography of the man whose killing by police inspired nationwide protests in 2020.
Olds, the 2013 Pulitzer winner for poetry, is one of five poetry finalists for her collection Balladz. The other finalists include Allison Adelle Hedge Coke for Look at This Blue; John Keene for Punks: New & Selected Poems; Roger Reeves for Best Barbarian; and Jenny Xie for The Rupture Tense.
The nominees for translated literature are include Jon Fosse’s A New Name: Septology VI-VII, translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls; Scholastique Mukasonga’s Kibogo, translated from French by Mark Polizzotti; Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone, translated from Spanish by Sarah Booker; Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell; and Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth, translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.
In the young people’s literature category, finalists include Kelly Barnhill for The Ogress and the Orphans, Sonora Reyes for The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School, Sabaa Tahir for All My Rage and Lisa Yee for Maizy Chen’s Last Chance. Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes and Dawud Anyabwile are also nominated for Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice.
A panel of judges selected the finalists from 1,772 books submitted by publishers – 463 in fiction, 607 in nonfiction, 260 in poetry, 146 in translated literature and 296 in young people’s literature. The winners will be announced in a live ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on 16 November, along with two lifetime achievement awards for Art Spiegelman and Tracie D Hall.
Last year’s winners included Jason Mott in fiction for his dark absurdist novel Hell of a Book, and Harvard historian Tiya Miles in nonfiction for All That She Carried.
